The Cork Summer Show returns once more and, as always, carries a huge programme of food-related events including a food ‘market’ featuring over 60 indoor and outdoor stalls and with plenty of areas for some casual picnicking on purchased fare while checking out some of the live entertainment on throughout the weekend.

What's big for food in the week ahead?

Joe McNamee brings you the latest news from the Irish food world.

Spirit of the City will take place from March 30 - April 1 at Cork's Cricket Club.

Quite some years ago, I took a stroll up the vertiginous incline of ‘Barracka’ (local parlance for Barrack St) with ‘The Money’, a potential investor seeking guidance.

Here’s what’s going on in the world of Irish food...

Catex — Ireland’s largest food service and hospitality exhibition — returns once more to Dublin’s RDS, on February 21-23. 

TASTE THIS

The Menu has to cast his mind back to the literal and metaphorical dark days of boarding school to recall the last time he regularly ate in total darkness, scoffing biscuits under the covers after lights out, the better to supplement the school canteen’s daily deep-fried offerings of items that may or may not have contained actual food.

Should you be looking for The Menu in the coming weeks then he shall mostly be found atop Neidín, roaming the wonderful wilds of West Cork with a knife in his belt and a skillet on his back for the Taste of West Cork Food Festival (Sept 9-18).

Those beards will certainly need a liberal dousing in flame retardant as The Big Grill BBQ & Craft Beer Festival (Aug 13-16) returns once more to Dublin’s Herbert Park. 

THERE’S a tense scene in the 1992 version of The Last of the Mohicans where a waterfall becomes a central if not dominant character for a few decisive scenes. A young Daniel-Day Lewis — bristling like a landmine with charisma, so smouldering and indefatigable that he makes Sunday nights’ Lazarus Poldark look like a pasty also-ran in an under-12 Feis competition — plays the rescuing angel Hawkeye.

The Foodie Forum incorporating the Gastronomy West Symposium (Tuesday, February 3) at GMIT, in Galway, may be just three years old but already comports itself with a swagger befitting its rapidly-growing status as one of the country’s premier food events.

Greene’s Restaurant, MacCurtain St, Cork;

The Kilkenny festival is something to savour.

The true Gael will daily encounter multiple reasons to swell with fierce pride as he or she ambles about our fair land but there are few finer reasons than our magnificent farmhouse cheeses, now of such variety and quality as to justly earn us a prime place on the global cheeseboard.

It’s champagne time for the country’s top chefs who made the grade in one of the most exclusive culinary and hospitality clubs in the land — the 100 Best Restaurants and 100 Best Places to Stay in Ireland.

West really is the best

WEST CORK is by now an internationally-recognised brand.

Chefs are going to greater lengths to source locally produced food and are increasingly opting for organic, AA Ireland found during its search for culinary excellence.

THE relentless rain failed to dampen the spirits of food lovers who flocked to Cork’s Fitzgerald Park to whet their appetites at TasteFest.